https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/our-research/drive-unit-for-digital-innovation/clinical-informatics-research-programme-cirp/
Clinical Informatics Research Programme (CIRP)
CIRP was established, thanks to investment from the Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity, to support clinical informatics research at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in partnership with Higher Education Institutes across the UK.
CIRP funds data scientists, clinical and non-clinical PhD fellowships, internships, and other activities that enable research. It focusses on developing the use of data and technology to transform delivery of care, for the benefit of patients at GOSH and the wider NHS.
CIRP research themes include data and informatics, human-computer interaction and clinical pathways and decision support.
Project examples
As a biomedical engineer and PhD student in digital health, Mairi noticed that there is lots of research on virtual reality (VR) in healthcare, but very little VR is used in the NHS. By conducting, analysing and reporting on interviews with healthcare professionals and co-design workshops with young people being treated for cancer, she hopes to bridge this gap by improving our understanding of how VR could be implemented in the NHS.
“Engineers regularly work with new technologies to solve niche problems, but they often have very little context for how the technology will be used in practice.... With services already up and running it can be difficult to fit in new technologies and ways of working, so it's important that my research will understand these obstacles so we can innovate around them.”
Mairi Therese Deighan is conducting her PhD at the University of Bristol.
Medicines go through rigorous testing to find out how they can be used most safely and effectively. This involves pharmacokinetics, the study of how a drug effects the body, such as how long it stays in the blood stream. The huge amount of information gathered in testing of medications could be used in a better way. Right now, it’s locked up in documents. Victoria’s research is looking at how we can automate the extraction of information so it could be presented more quickly and in a useful way. This could help doctors to treat patients, but also be used for vital research into better treatments.
“Right now it takes decades to research new drug treatments, but if we can use previous information about similar medications, we could make these discoveries much, much faster.”
Victoria Smith is conducting her PhD at the UKRI AI Enabled Healthcare Systems CDT at University College London.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems give us comprehensive digital patient data, which could allow hospital staff and researchers to identify children and young people for whom known treatments exist that may be better suited to them. However, we don't know how data in EHRs are connected, and how we can use them to help solve research and clinical questions.
John will use anonymised data from patients treated for kidney problems at GOSH to creates graphs out of connected data points. This means graph analytics could then be used with EHR data to solve research and clinical questions.
"Visualising the connections between data to help us find new things is not a completely new idea, but it's never been done with routinely collected data in healthcare.
This research could uncover how we can use data for this important dimension in healthcare."
John Booth is conducting his PhD at the UCL GOS Institute of Child Health.